Hi all
How does freepbx manage call recordings? By default, will it just keep recording until running out of HDD space?
If I then archive off the old recordings, how do I manage their access, as they will no longer be accessible from the CDR interface?
Thanks in advance.
You have found what I believe to be troublesome with the call recording module. If the archive gets too large instead of giving the user a link to download it gives them the folder to access the archive in. This becomes very difficult if you do not want to give your end user root level access to the system. Is there a way for the Call Recordings Report module to always give a link to the archive, no matter the size?
Oh, it gets worse. Once you get around 1,000,000 calls, booting the system takes 20 minutes.
There are lots of things wrong with the call recording module. A few have been improved (like the source and destination being in the title to avoid simultaneous call collisions) but there is still much room for someone to build a commercial module and share the gold with Sangoma.
I am actually not using the call recording module just yet. Got lots of HDD space left.
I wonder if its possible to get freepbx to do call recordings in MP3 instead. I wouldn’t have to worry about it for a while then! 
I wrote an MP3 converter for phone messages for a customer. It also copied the files off the PBX and onto a “cloud server” (it’s basically a mauve database, but they’re happy) so that they can keep their call recordings all in one place.
The trickiest part is making sure the file doesn’t get deleted from the server before you’re done transcoding it.
Oh yeah - the reason I did it that way was to avoid having to do the transcode on the fly while they were calling. Transcoding can be CPU intensive, so you want to postpone it if you can.
How do you do that whilst keeping the CDR database intact? Otherwise its impossible to locate the recordings vs calls…
So this converter takes a recorded call on a system and automatically makes a copy of it to a remote server?
Code - lots and lots of code. The entire system is comprised of a dozen PERL scripts. It also maintains its own database.
Also, we don’t use UCP for any of this, since the calls are not the property of the people calling - they belong to the company. Once the calls are transcoded and moved, they drop out of the server and away from the hands of the CSRs.
Yes. It’s a system I’ve been working on since 2006.
Interested in selling it?
It’s very tightly coupled to this customer’s process. Message me off-line, I’m sure I can help you out one way or another.
Ah I see. Excellent, I will do thanks.
If you have an external file-system available ( called external), then:-
mount -o bind /external /var/spool/asterisk/monitor/
should work , if you do that make sure that you have in your /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf
cache_record_files => yes
record_cache_dir => (any internal directory)